I was curious if this practice would get you banned. Maybe it can really help?
I am really trying to understand the workings of how search engines rank sites and found out that keywords inside meta tags are really useful and so is a description within meta tags. I was wondering if I could copy+paste a popular sites meta tags and use them on my own site? What do you guys think? Oh and remember fatjack's motto, the thanks will be distributed accordingly. heh

i agree with the above but do take into consideration the report below

10 Ways to get Your Sites banned or Removed by Search Engines
By Charles Hopkins | Published 05/26/2007 | Webmastering |
10 Ways to get Your Sites banned or removed by Search Engines

Of course your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) efforts should be targeted towards high search engine ranking for your keywords, but you must beware of the over optimization penalty. This happens when the search engines consider your page has been designed for the unique purpose of ranking well.

Most SEO experts teach you how to optimize a web page for good search engine ranking, but very few tell you what you must NOT do if you want to avoid over optimization penalty and see your page rank drop or your site get de-indexed.

Here are 10 things you should consider if you are serious about SEO:

1 Website Content Theft:

Never steal content from other websites. If you are reported you will immediately be banned or removed from their index. Not to mention other legal issues.

2 Standard Language:

Do not use slang or rude words in your copy as it can get you de-indexed.

3 Outgoing Links:

Do not exceed 100 outgoing links, always link to good quality sites and never link to farm links. Extra tip: you must check your outgoing links on a regular basis to make sure they are still working and the quality of the sites you are linking to is still good.

4 URL Length:

Keep your URLs less than 100 characters long and avoid using more than 3 hyphens "-" in your URLs.

5 Keyword Density:

Keep your keyword density under 5% or it could be considered keyword spamming.

6 Title Tag:

Your title tag should contain less than 60 characters and should not contain any special characters.

Put less than 10 keywords in your keyword meta tag and make sure every keyword appears in your web page copy. Also, avoid putting the same keyword twice in your keyword meta tag. The fact is that nowadays search engines (mainly Google) do not really consider the Keyword meta tag for ranking, but if you do not follow these simple rules, you will get smacked in the face!

9 Proper use of Alt Text.

If you use pictures and put your keyword in the alt text, your alt text must describe the picture. You could write something like: "keyword header", "keyword image" or "keyword logo" but never stuff lots of keywords in your alt texts. Again, this would be considered keyword spamming.

10 Cloaking.

Never, ever, use cloaking. Cloaking consists in coding the page in such a way that parts of the content will be seen by search engines but will not be displayed to users. If you do that, you will get banned!

Finally, remember that search engine algorithms change frequently. So keep up to date by browsing the SEO sites and forums.

These 10 simple rules are no guarantee that you will rank well in the search engines, however one thing is sure, if you break these rules you will be penalized in the search results, lose page rank and maybe even get de-indexed altogether.

My understanding were meta tags were being used less and less by the search engine bots.

Click to expand...

The bots are more sophisticated than that... they'll give you credit for relevant tags. But they'll check it against your content (and eventually, time-on-site spent by users they forward, users who were refered after searching for the terms in your tags).

But irrelevant tags will be (more often now, than in the past) interpreted as keyword stuffing and prolly get your site low-ranked or deindexed.

Also, meta description especially has an important human factor... that might be the line that human surfers see in SERPs. If that description is good/compelling, then you'll get better traffic from organic.

So swiping a compelling "headline" from a top ranked site can definitely be a good idea.

Put less than 10 keywords in your keyword meta tag and make sure every keyword appears in your web page copy. Also, avoid putting the same keyword twice in your keyword meta tag. The fact is that nowadays search engines (mainly Google) do not really consider the Keyword meta tag for ranking, but if you do not follow these simple rules, you will get smacked in the face!

Click to expand...

My opinion is that search engines don't ignore the meta keywords... the bots just don't believe that meta without checking against the site content anymore, like they used to.

Can't prove that of course... though we can prove that the bots still read the meta keywords... else people wouldn't get penalized if that line was overstuffed.

Metadescription is not even considered by google.
And I have tried this personally, by having same keyword targeted on 2 different domains, both ranking same good with or without.

But it is what some other search engines use as the displaying text in there search results.

So a good description can be good to have.

Keyword density of 5% I think would be considered as spam already, you will rank and index with this high density but not as high as you would have if you would have had lower density.

Meta keywords, I add personally about 3-4 extra keywords beside the one that I am trying to rank for.
Have not seen any difference by having just the keyword I try to rank for or have 3-4 extra.
I just do it this way.

Hyphens, I don't think matter at all how many you use, but I could be wrong.
Have not tested this actually so this part I am talking out of my but.

And on page seo, really have not seen much that can get you deindexed beside having links to another subdomain, this has lately gotten my sites that where having linking between subdomains banned.

Could some1 inform me as to what keyword density is? Oh and about the google not considering metadescriptions. I have been reading a book, Oreillys website optimization, and it says that metakeywords arent looked as so much but the metadescriptions are. So I guess it is important to have a metadescription in sentence and hyphen style that has a lot of your keywords in it.

so then where do i put my keywords on my site for search engines to recognize? in the text and body content? in the title? thanks

Click to expand...

You would put your keywords in:

Metatag keywords
title of the page , this part I would look in to as well to make it readable sentence and not just the keyword. something like "News about keyword" or what ever you want it to be.
H1 tag
in the article it self

And repeat it in the article so that you have near 3% in keyword density total for the page.

Metadescription is important because other search engines, (don't remeber which ones) use that as the serp result.
In google they are doing you absolutely nothing.

But Meta description should be written with care, not keyword stuffed jabba jabba as it is suppose to be human readable.

Keyword density is how many times a keyword is repeated in a html page.
Many people count only what is humanly readable, but you need to consider meta tags and other parts of you page.

Open the pages source and count how many words there is in your article and how many times your keyword have been repeated in your page including, titles, metadescription and tags.

Kandor

Click to expand...

MSN, Yahoo and Google WILL use the meta description in search engine results. You just need to tell them to do so rather than use content scraped by a bot.

Use this to have them use the description in search results:

Code:

<meta name="robots" content="index,follow,noodp,noydir" />

The important part here is the "noodp, noydir.

By using these tags in the meta, you will see that the search engines will now use your meta description tag in search engine results rather than information stored in their directory based on the bot that scraped your page. It is highly recommended to use these tags and meta description.

Figure it like this, many years ago - all the search engines used meta info. Google decided that the info wasn't too trustworthy, seems some webmasters would actually lie about what the site was about !!! go figure ..

Google is very ADVANCED compared to other search engines, but all the little guys and trying hard to catch up to Google. Whatever Google is doing today, the little guys will be doing eventually. So optimize for Google, and make it backwards compatible for everyone else and you should be good to go.

Google's advancement allows it to go more into the page to see what the content really is and is now to the point that their bots can not only read the words on the page, but can give weight to the words based on keyword density (like using the same word 3 times in 100 words is 3%) AND with the LSI, weight based on OTHER words on the pages. (LSI is a fancy way to figure out how the words are used in context. Lemon on a car site is way different than lemon on a cooking site.) (Oversimplifying LSI for demonstration)

But, there are tons of bots floating around from tons of indexing sites now. Some still use the meta's and still send traffic (albiet small amounts, but traffic is traffic). As technology grows, the middle level search engines will use the LSI technology more and more.

So, use the meta tags? YES. Traffic is traffic. Takes just a minute and might get some visitors eventually because of it. Use it to be backwards compatible if nothing else.

As stated above, good meta tags will make your site look nicer in results pages - so don't stuff them, make them readable and useful while including KEY keywords. It's a very short ad that you get for free to grab someone's attention.

Copy someone else's meta tags? Rewrite them a little if you do. Nothing wrong with getting a good idea and using it yourself - but you should be unique. Switch a couple words around and good to go. The ONLY problem with this is making sure the same meta tags actually pertain to your site. A quick tweak will make sure they do.

Lastly, grab a newer book on SEO for Google, lots available here in the forums. Google is constantly changing, and while they are not the ONLY game in town - they are the biggest for most people. A great way to learn about Google is to go to Google and ask them.

MSN, Yahoo and Google WILL use the meta description in search engine results. You just need to tell them to do so rather than use content scraped by a bot.

Use this to have them use the description in search results:

Code:

<meta name="robots" content="index,follow,noodp,noydir" />

The important part here is the "noodp, noydir.

By using these tags in the meta, you will see that the search engines will now use your meta description tag in search engine results rather than information stored in their directory based on the bot that scraped your page. It is highly recommended to use these tags and meta description.

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